Federal Reserve Said to Fine Goldman Sachs In Confidential Leak Case

The U.S. Federal Reserve is preparing an enforcement action against Goldman Sachs Group related to a leak of confidential government information to one of its employees, the New York Timesreported on Monday.

The action will include a penalty of less than $50 million, the Times said, citing people briefed on the matter.

The Fed is also considering taking action against a former Goldman executive who had access to the leaked material, according to the Times, which did not name the former executive.

The Fed penalty would come two years after revelations that an employee at the New York Fed, Jason Gross, had leaked sensitive information to a Goldman banker named Rohit Bansal. Gross and Bansal pleaded guilty to theft of government property in November.

Goldman gs has already paid a $50 million penalty to New York’s Department of Financial Services related to the issue.

Goldman Sachs said on Monday the employee and the senior who failed to escalate the issue were terminated.

The company said it had started an investigation and appropriate regulators were notified as soon as the company learned about the leak.

Eric Holder: Edward Snowden ‘Performed a Public Service’

Eric Holder, former Attorney General of the United States under President Barack Obama, has offered some praise to Edward Snowden, the U.S. National Security Agency contractor-turned-whistleblower. On Monday, Holder called Snowden’s decision to leak state secrets to the media in 2013 a “public service.”

Well, at least that’s how Holder described the end result of Snowden’s decision, which cast a national spotlight on government mass surveillance. Holder was admittedly less enthusiastic about Snowden’s means: surreptitiously taking a trove of state secrets to the press.

“We can certainly argue about the way in which Snowden did what he did, but I think that he actually performed a public service by raising the debate that we engaged in and by the changes that we made,” Holder told David Axelrod, host of The Axe Files, a CNN podcast on politics.

Holder then cut his commendations with remarks more befitting his ex-office as the nation’s top lawyer. “Now I would say that doing what he did—and the way he did it—was inappropriate and illegal,” he added. “He harmed American interests.”

This is not the first time that Holder has offered cautious plaudits to the leaker. In an interview with Yahoo News last year, Holder said that “his [Snowden’s] actions spurred a necessary debate,” while adding that mentioned that “possibility exists” for Snowden to return to the United States.

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Originally, Holder said that Snowden pleading guilty to the charges against him would be a precondition of his return.

Snowden, for his part, has welcomed the idea of returning to face a jury, as long as the government “would guarantee a fair trial.” Earlier this year he said he would “make a public interest defense.”

In the latest interview, Holder said that he believes Snowden should still face a reckoning. “I think there’s got to be a consequence for what he’s done,” he said. “But I think that in deciding what an appropriate sentence should be, I think a judge could take into account the usefulness of having had that national debate.”

Before listeners get too cozy thinking Holder has had a change of heart and softened his outlook on the leaker, its worth keeping in mind that the U.S. has charged Snowden, who now lives in Moscow, under the Espionage Act. The law precludes protections for whistleblowers.

Bill Gates Surprised by Absence of Americans in Panama Papers

Despite all the revelations about offshore accounts from the Panama Papers, a massive leak of 11.5 million documents from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonesca, the number of Americans named in the cache is shockingly low.

Bill Gates, the international philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder msft, expressed some disbelief at the scarcity during a recent interview with CNBC. Asked whether he was surprised by the reports that have come from the breach, he remarked—with more than a touch of humor—that he thought more people from the U.S. would have been exposed as being linked to offshore accounts.

“I was surprised there were so few Americans,” he said with a shrug and a grin.

“Whenever you file your tax return, you are asked to declare what overseas bank accounts and assets you have,” he added. “It doesn’t mean that everybody, absolutely answers that question correctly.”

Although its difficult to say with certainty how many Americans are included in the leak, initial reports have turned up associations. The documents appear to include at least 200 scanned American passports. Further, about 3,100 of the 214,000 offshore companies in the data dump appear to have ties to Americans, reported McClatchy, along with 3,500 shareholders of named companies that listed U.S. addresses.

Why so few Americans? Perhaps Mossack Fonseca was unpopular with U.S. clients. Maybe they manipulated the tax system in other ways, including taking advantage of certain domestic state laws that allow for a degree of anonymity. Or, as one well-known whistleblower has asserted, maybe American intelligence agencies are behind the data dump. Who knows?

Gates’ comments came up tangentially in the CNBC interview. The main focus of the conversation, which took place in Qatar, was on a philanthropic initiative he helped debut that aims to provide aid to the world’s poorest Muslim countries.

Sky News claims to have taken possession of tens of thousands of the terror group’s registration forms, “containing 22,000 names, addresses, telephone numbers and family contacts of Islamic State jihadis.”

The news organization got the files on a USB stick that was stolen from the head of ISIS’s security police by a member who became disillusioned, Sky News said.

The leak includes the details of many known ISIS fighters, but also many people who were not previously known to have joined the group from Europe, North America, the Middle East and elsewhere.

Some of these people may have returned home after going through ISIS’s bureaucracy, making the documents — if real — of intense interest to authorities around the world. Sky News said it has informed the authorities of what it has.

The article theorizes that many of the phone numbers in the documents will be currently used by the ISIS members themselves, which will prove extremely useful to agencies that can monitor such things. One of the files in the cache apparently identifies recruits who are willing to martyr themselves.

Everything you need to know about the CIA director email hack

A hacker and his buddies claimed this week to have broken into the personal email account of John Brennan, director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. No mean feat, to be sure. Initially, people were incredulous that a self-identified stoner high school student, according to the New York Post, could have gained unauthorized access to the Aol email account of the nation’s top spy chief.

Then came the leaks. The hacker, appearing on Twitter under the handle @phphax and @_CWA_ (the latter account has since been suspended), posted screenshots of sensitive information for top U.S. officials and others. The leaks included an alleged phone call log of former CIA deputy director Avril Haines, as well as Social Security numbers for more than a dozen U.S. officials, including Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson, whose Comcast account, the hacker claimed, had also been breached.

The hacker—part of a group that identifies as CWA, or “Crackas With Attitude”—apparently gained access to the account associated with Brennan by masquerading as Verizon VZ employees, manipulating workers at the company into divulging Brennan’s information, and then eventually taking control of the account. (Verizon bought Aol for $4.4 billion earlier this year.)

Social engineering, as the scam is known, is a common ruse. (Of course, it’s also possible that the hacker lied, or that it was an inside job; this early on, who knows?)

Although officials have not confirmed whether the account was indeed Brennan’s, comments from a CIA spokesperson—along with the contents of the leaked documents—seem to suggest that it was.

“The hacking of the Brennan family account is a crime and the Brennan family is the victim,” said spokesman Dean Boyd on behalf of the intelligence agency in a statement. “The private electronic holdings of the Brennan family were plundered with malicious intent and are now being distributed across the web. This attack is something that could happen to anyone and should be condemned, not promoted.”

“There is no indication that any the documents released thus far are classified,” Boyd added, invoking a line of defense that presidential candidate and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used after the public learned that she had used a private email server for official state business. (That assertion turned out to be false, in Clinton’s case.) “In fact, they appear to be documents that a private citizen with national security interests and expertise would be expected to possess.”

David Samberg, a Verizon spokesman, told Fortune via email: “Verizon and its operations, including AOL, take the security of customer information very seriously. We are working with law enforcement to actively investigate.”

On Oct. 16, Aol apparently deactivated the account in question after a battle with Brennan over its ownership. The hackers claim to have had access to the account for three days.

By Monday afternoon, the hacking group had begun posting redacted—and eventually non-redacted—versions of their allegedly pilfered documents.

WikiLeaks soon got in on the act, too, vowing to publish the leaked documents “over the coming days.”

As promised, the site rolled out the first leaked files soon after. The documents were a bit underwhelming, truth be told. They included recommendations on U.S. foreign policy pertaining to Iran; a letter from the vice chair of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee on ways to frame the CIA’s harsh interrogation methods as “compliant” and “legal;” a copy of Brennan’s national security background investigation SF-86 Form (which contains his Social Security number, a record of his past addresses; and information on his close family members), as well as a legal docket involving a dispute between Brennan’s former private firm—The Analysis Corporation—and the CIA. All the documents appear to date back to 2007-2008.

On Thursday, WikiLeaks continued publishing more documents. One file is a report on strategic recommendations for the U.S. in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Another is a concise six-bullet point summary of that document. And the third is a list of email addresses allegedly contained in Brennan’s Aol contact list, which includes more than 100 government email addresses.

Compared to other data leaks this year, the Brennan Files appear to offer peanuts as far as actual revelations or public interest is concerned. The most shocking thing about the leaks—aside from the private information, which can be abused by identity thieves and financial fraudsters—so far are the headlines: Stoner high school student hacks CIA director’s personal email. The contents themselves are pretty mundane.

Details of US drone program revealed by new leaker

On Thursday, The Intercept published “The Drone Papers,” an eight-part investigation into the U.S. drone program.

The documents were provided by an anonymous inside source who has worked on the program. Jeremy Scahill, one of the Intercept co-founders, says that the source wanted to expose the information because he believes that the American public should know who the government chooses to assassinate, and how.

The chain of command starts with the Joint Special Operations Command task force, which will make a case for targeting a certain individual; that case is then passed along up the chain, eventually reaching President Obama, the final tier of authorization. At any point in the process, if an official disagrees that the target should be assassinated, it stops.

The White House and Pentagon have described the program to the American public as precise with minimal casualties, but the statistics say otherwise. The Drone Papers specify a period between January 2012 and February 2013 in northeastern Afghanistan during which these airstrikes killed over 200 people; only 35 of those killed were the intended targets. Around 80% of those killed by drone strikes were not the intended target, though the source says that they weren’t all necessarily innocent civilians. The Intercept’s source calls it “a phenomenal gamble.”

As for who this source is, Laura Poitras’ 2014 documentary confirms a second source in tandem with the Edward Snowden leak, but it’s unclear whether or not the same source is responsible for leaking the Drone Papers.

Twitter’s leaked earnings: Double trouble

Twitter TWTR became a victim of its own platform today when Selerity, a financial data service, found its quarterly results on Twitter’s investors relations page and tweeted them.

The speed at which Twitter’s leaked results moved across Twitter shows the social network’s strength. It is a powerful platform, where real-time news can spread like wildfire.

But the content of the leak shows Twitter’s challenge. Twitter’s first quarter was not stellar. The company missed analysts expectations on revenue and revised its guidance downward for the rest of the year. Investors traded the stock down by 4% before trading was halted. When trading resumed, shares were down more than 20%.

Later in the day, the Nasdaq stock exchange, the host of Twitter’s investor relations page through Shareholder.com, accepted blame for the early disclosure of the earnings report, according to the Wall Street Journal. “Our Shareholder.com inadvertently made an early version of Twitter’s earnings release publicly accessible,” said Joe Christinat, a Nasdaq spokesman. “We’re investigating the root cause. The issue did not impact other shareholder.com clients.”

What you need to know: Twitter reported 302 million monthly active users in the first quarter, in line with estimates and an 18% increase over last year. The company’s biggest weakness, in the eyes of investors, is that it isn’t adding new users as fast as they would like. For the past year, CEO Dick Costolo has been touting product improvements meant to increase engagement and lure lapsed users back to the service, but the results don’t show a huge change.

The big number: $436 million. The company’s quarterly revenue, an increase of 74% over last year, was lower than analysts expectations of $457 million and below Twitter’s guidance of $440 million to $450 million. The company continues to increase revenue significantly, but Wall Street is focused on profitability and the company’s inability to beat expectations. Twitter lowered its guidance for annual revenue from $2.3 billion to $2.170 – $2.2 billion.

What you might have missed: Twitter acquired TellApart, an advertising tech company which helps retailers and commerce sites target shoppers on their mobile phones. The move shows Twitter’s desire to “close the gap” between a user seeing a Twitter ad and making a purchase. If Twitter can prove its ads are responsible for driving sales, it can charge more for those ads. TellApart had raised $17 million in venture capital. TellApart’s investors include Twitter CEO Dick Costolo.

(This story was updated with additional information about the source of the leaked earnings release)